The image gallery pages present selected astronomical images taken with the Tautenburg Schmidt
Camera on photographic plates or CCD. The effective size of the plates is
23cm x 23cm. This is equivalent to a field of view of 3.3° x 3.3° on
the sky. For comparison: The full Moon has an apparent diameter of 0.5°.
The CCD uses only a field of 0.7° x 0.7°, but is much more sensitve
and thus needs only shorter exposure times.

The photographic plates have been completely digitized by means of the Tautenburg Plate
Scanner. The linear resolution is 10µm x 10µm (0.5" x 0.5")
per pixel. Thus, the resulting digital images of the photographic plates are
23000 x 23000 pixels in size. Each pixel is digitized with 4096 grey levels
(12 bit resolution). This results in 1 GB of data per digitized plate.

The following pictures are presented either as grey-scale images or as colour
composits. The grey-scale images show the intensity distribution of the
oncoming light as registered by the detector (photographic plate or CCD). In
contrast, the colour images are the result of a digital combination of several
grey-scale images of the same part of the sky taken through different filters.
The digital colour images are created by the assignment of the individual
grey-scale images to a corresponding colour channel (red, green and blue). If
several images of the same pass-band were available, these images were
digitally co-added in a first step to achieve a higher signal-to-noise ratio.

Some images are displayed with reduced resolution. The reproduction is allowed
for private purposes or for education only, provided that the source
"Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg" is cited. Any publication or
commercial usage request a prior written consent of the Thüringer
Landessternwarte. All copyrights remain at the Thüringer Landessternwarte
Tautenburg.